Re: SIGTERM ignored before exec race

[Chet Ramey]

On 2/17/13 7:46 PM, Pádraig Brady wrote:

>>> I notice the following will wait for 5 seconds for
>>> the timeout process to end with SIGALRM, rather than
>>> immediately due to kill sending the SIGTERM.
>>
>> I think the way to approach this is to change the SIGTERM handling from
>> straight SIG_IGN to a handler installed with SA_RESTART that catches the
>> signal but does nothing with it.
>>
>> That will allow the shell to note whether it receives a SIGTERM between
>> fork and exec and react accordingly.
> 
> Thanks for continuing to look at this.
> Just in case you need to consider other options,
> elaborating a bit on my previous suggestion:

I looked at this, and it ended up being a little more complicated and a
little less flexible than the approach I adopted.

> Your suggested method I think is to have a handler something like
> the following which should work too, but perhaps with the caveat
> that the exit status of the child before the exec might not have
> the signal bit set.

No, much simpler.  The signal handler just sets a flag.  It's only
installed by interactive shells, so the flag never changes in any other
shell.  Setting the flag to 0 at appropriate times and checking for
non-zero values at appropriate times is all that's needed.  If a child
process finds the flag non-zero, it calls the usual terminating signal
handler, which ends up killing the shell with the same signal.

Chet
-- 
``The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne.'' - Chaucer
                 ``Ars longa, vita brevis'' - Hippocrates
Chet Ramey, ITS, CWRU    chet@case.edu    http://cnswww.cns.cwru.edu/~chet/